Recycled Stormwater Among Australia Options as Water Plant Idled

By Jason Scott -
Feb 4, 2013

Victoria Water Minister Peter Walsh,
whose government is paying A$1.8 million ($1.9 million) a day
for an idled desalination plant, said the facility costs too
much and the state is considering recycling stormwater instead
to meet some needs.

“There are other options to ensure Melbourne’s water
supply” including more efficient recycling of drainwater, Walsh
said in a telephone interview. “The previous government could
have been looking at this rather than making a rash decision on
a very expensive project.”

Walsh’s Liberal-National coalition inherited the A$3.5
billion Wonthaggi plant on Australia’s south coast when it beat
Labor in the November 2010 state election. Since the plant was
ordered in 2007, the nation’s most prolonged drought has broken,
leaving nearly dry dams in Victoria state almost full after
floods and storms caused at least A$7 billion of insured losses
and 40 deaths nationwide the past three years.

Termed “Labor’s white elephant” by the Canberra Times,
the plant co-developed by Suez Environnement (SEV) shows the perils of
planning water supplies in the driest populated continent. The
desalination plant for Sydney, Australia’s largest city, has
been idle since July. The Gold Coast desalination plant in
Queensland state was turned on last month after a two-year
hiatus to provide water for the third-biggest city, Brisbane.

Since 2006, the nation’s five largest cities have spent
billions on desalination plants for a secondary source of water.
The energy-intensive plants make the water more costly than that
from aquifers and reservoirs.

On Standby

Adelaide’s desalination plant, built at a cost of A$1.8
billion, completed work to double its capacity to 100 gigaliters
in December and is in the process of commissioning, the South
Australian state government said in an e-mailed statement.

In Melbourne’s case, AquaSure Pty Ltd. was created to bid
for the project in a group that included Suez, Europe’s
second-largest water utility, its subsidiary Degremont SA, and
construction company Thiess Pty Ltd. to build and operate a
plant capable of turning as much as 150 billion liters (39.6
billion gallons) of saltwater a year into potable water.

“The project timetable was always very demanding,”
Aquasure said in an e-mailed response to questions. “It was
made worse by the rainfall” and industrial disputes.

Suez, which is Paris-based and supplies 30 percent of
Australia’s drinking water, has taken 322 million euros ($435
million) of provisions on the project due to delays, cost
overruns, strikes and bad weather, according to the company.

Under the contract the previous Labor government signed
with AquaSure, the plant, operating or not, now costs Victoria
state a minimum of A$1.8 million a day, Walsh said. Should water
be ordered, the cost will increase at a fixed rate.

‘Last Resort’

“Our view is there should be a desalination plant as a
last resort for Melbourne,” Walsh said Jan. 30 of the country’s
second-largest city. “It didn’t need to be as big as or as
expensive as this one.”

“In any given year there’s more stormwater that runs off
Melbourne into Port Phillip Bay than Melbourne consumes,” Walsh
said. “We’re not saying we should be drinking that but we are
saying that can be utilized for non-potable purposes,”
including watering urban parks and sports fields.

The government has allocated A$50 million in grants to
assist water authorities to utilize stormwater and recycled
water. A new suburb in East Werribee will predominantly use
stormwater for public spaces, he said.

Tony Wong, chief executive officer of the Cooperative
Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, said securing water
supplies for Australia should be beyond politics.

Projects ‘Politicized’

“Notwithstanding the debate on whether it needed to be as
large as it is, the circumstances leading to the decision to
commission the desalination plant, and its strategic function,
are often conveniently forgotten,” Wong said. “I am always
concerned that important nation-building infrastructure projects
are politicized.”

The desalination plant “will provide Melbourne with an
important underpinning water security that enables it to now
develop a broader strategy for a sustainable and resilient water
system,” he said.